“Get off my property!” Pursuing the people’s mayor.

When news broke that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford had been seen in a video smoking crack cocaine, the days of conventional City Hall reporting ended. The pack descended, and the waiting game began.

Ford was well into his mayoralty when the crack story first broke on May 16, 2013. He had already been close to losing his office for allegedly violating the Ontario Municipal Conflict of Interest Act. He had already used city resources to coach high school football on the side. He had already admitted to reading while driving and even called the cops on a CBC prankster at his front door. His seemingly never-ending, always evolving gag reel of missteps made him a fixture of Toronto media.

Then along came the rest of the world.

American gossip website Gawkerbroke the crack video story, and soon countless other media outlets that had never before cared about Toronto’s municipal politics started sending their star personalities to scope out the scene at the clam shell.

Ford had always been only selectively available to the media. Now, the group of reporters he was dodging had grown. As more and more people wanted answers, Ford answered less and less. His refusal to comment, combined with journalists’ need to know, cooked up a fiery press pack taking on the mayor day in, day out, for weeks.

Did the press play right into Ford’s media playbook with its coverage of the crack scandal? What options did city hall reporters have? And did the press ultimately do the right thing for their audiences and live up to their ethics codes? The following essay delves into the ethical quandaries that arise from pack journalism.

Setting the tone for the Ford mayoralty

Even before becoming mayor, Ford’s behaviour in
council and in public, and his tendency to deny any wrongdoing, was well
documented.

As a councillor, he was thrown out of a Maple
Leafs game for his drunken rowdiness, an incident he initially denied, saying
he had never even been at the game. And he was arrested for drunk driving in
Florida in 1999, an incident he also denied until admitting to it just months
before his election to the mayor’s office.

As his mayoralty went on, the media gathered a
gag reel packed with strange and confounding, but mostly harmless, gaffes.

Highlights include the mayor’s As It Happens interview soon after being elected. He answered host Carol Off’s questions between bellows to the high school football team he coached. Then he abruptly ended the interview.

“Pardon me? I can’t talk to you right now—I’m
really, I’m on a really tight schedule,” said Ford, before haphazardly wrapping
up, promising Off they’d chat again soon, and hanging up.

That interview, on the day after his election,
set the tone, on a national stage, for the next three years of Mayor Ford’s
stunted and strange interactions with the press. (Something that had been on
full display throughout the mayoral election campaign.)

Rob Ford was an unconventional councillor who
became the unconventional mayor.

And he has developed an unconventional approach
to dealing with the media.

When Gawker and The Toronto Star reported
that a drug dealer tried selling them a then-alleged video of Toronto Mayor Rob
Ford smoking crack cocaine, “it’s ridiculous” was all the mayor said in
response for over a week. It would be eight days until he held a press
conference to address the allegations, and, still, he chose his words carefully
—“I cannot comment on a video I have not seen or
does not exist” — and left many questions unanswered.

As more questions surfaced over the following
weeks — about the photo, the homicide victim, the alleged crack house and its
residents — the mayor continued to give the media the silent treatment. At one
press conference in June, he five times swatted away reporters’ questions about
the piling allegations against him with the response “anything else?” and then
left the room.

But even before the crack-scandal, Mayor Ford
wasn’t known for penciling many media dates into his schedule.

Jonathan Goldsbie, a city hall reporter for Now
Magazine, said he recalls only one time that the mayor has ever set foot in
the press gallery during his mayoralty.

“He has this quality of a rare beast about him
that any time you find him in person and have the opportunity to speak to him
is a real special occasion,” said Goldsbie.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, former CBC journalist, NPR
ombudsman, and current journalism program director at the University of
Toronto, said that part of the problem when covering Mayor Ford is that he
carefully chooses his interviews.

“If you’re not a friend of Fords you don’t have
access,” he said. For example, “Rob Ford is very happy to go on the John Oakley
show on AM 640. And they’re on first name basis.”

Likewise, the last time Goldsbie can remember
the mayor doing a one-on-one interview with a Toronto newspaper other than Joe
Warmington from the Toronto Sun, who he regularly sits down with, was in
2011.

According to Patrice Dutil, a politics and
public administration expert from Ryerson University, politicians often use
this kind of interview favoritism to control their message and set their own
media agenda.

“Otherwise you’re constantly playing in the
hands of the opposition, you’re constantly reacting to what the opposition is
saying,” he said. “This is an opportunity to put your message forward and
hopefully to have it conveyed directly to the voting population and not translated
or not seen through the prism of a journalist or a media outlet that might be
hostile to him or her.”

Dvorkin said it’s not unusual for politicians to
steer clear of the media in this way, pointing out that federal politicians in
Canada have been avoiding the Ottawa press core since the Chrétien years; U.S.
President Barack Obama, he noted, has given fewer press conferences than his
predecessor, George W. Bush, and when he does, he exclusively goes to a couple
of reporters in the press pool.

Thinking back to when he covered the late
Montréal Mayor Jean Drapeau, Dvorkin remembers one time when the media chased
Drapeau down a corridor. “He actually slapped the microphone out of the hand of
the reporter,” said Dvorkin.

“It’s not just Rob Ford,” he said “This is a
pattern of behaviour that politicians are increasingly resorting to and it is
gives them the impression of being beleaguered, which is actually what they
want. They want to be able to say they are victims of the media.”

Journalist and author Craig Crawford writes
about politicians’ calculated efforts to play victims of the media. Crawford asserts that in the Bush-Senior era, “politicians
and their friends conducted a full assault on ‘liberal media.’ The Bush family
made it a personal crusade.” Clinton, he goes on to argue, “perfected some of
their techniques when faced with coverage of his personal life.” Finally, “a
new cable outlet, the Fox News Channel, pursued and found a winning audience of
those who believed the media was biased against conservatives.” With this,
Crawford argues that politicians succeeded in provoking Americans to view the
mainstream media as an enemy to their culture and values (Craig Crawford, Attack
the Messenger: How Politicians Turn You Against the Media, 2006).

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to say
there’s a bias in the mainstream liberal media in this city against Rob Ford,”
Doug Ford said to a graduate journalism class at Ryerson University in
November. “With the foam coming out of their mouth trying to come at us, I
wouldn't say that’s fair.”

Doug Ford further called the Toronto media the
biggest bullies on the planet. “I have not seen any politician being harassed,
his family being harassed, like we’ve been harassed,” he said.

Councillor Ford went on the offensive again in a
December scrum with reporters, comparing the Toronto media to “Soviet Stalin-era
Pravda journalism,” reported Daniel Dale of The Toronto Star.

“For the folks that don’t know what Pravda
journalism [is], back in the day of Stalin, that tries to coerce, get the
people to believe in what they’re doing,” he said in Dale’s transcript of the
scrum.

In Dutil’s opinion, the game of the Fords is to
get media attention — good or bad.

“Just get their face in the
media and get people to talk about them,” he said.

Dutil believes the mayor hasn't resigned yet
because he is in survival mode, fearing that if he’s out of the public view, he
will disappear.

Even so, Mayor Ford continues to largely ignore
Toronto and national media. The day after the police publicly released
wiretap information that contained new allegations of blackmail, bribery and
heroin use in a case involving the Mayor Ford’s friend Alessandro Lisi, the
mayor went on a U.S. radio show, 106.7 The Fan in Washington D.C., for 24
minutes — and invited the station to city hall — while ignoring all questions
from Toronto media.

For Dvorkin, a reasoned relationship between the
Fords and the media is a lost cause at this point.

“It’s not in [Mayor Ford’s] interest to speak to
the media, he feels that this is not how he can best get his message out to
Ford Nation, and frankly the media wants to ask him tough and embarrassing
questions,” he said. “The game is done for the media and the Ford
administration.”

In a survey of news editors’ attitudes to
closely covering the private lives of public officials, Sigman Splichal and
Bruce Garrison found “newspaper editors appear to concede that, as distasteful
as it is, such reporting is likely to stay. Like it or not, they must report
such information if it becomes newsworthy, which nowadays is synonymous with
published elsewhere” (Sigman Splichal and Bruce Garrison, “News Editors show Concern for Privacy of Public Officials," 2003).

They go on to note that readers’ interest in
such stories is often a motivating factor in covering them, but at the same
time “giving readers what they want hurts news
media credibility.” Thus the dilemma becomes a case of giving the public the
information they need and want at the cost of being disliked for that very act
(Splichal and Garrison, 2003).

Some viewed the throng of reporters,
photographers, and camera people that converged on Ford’s driveway the morning
police chief Bill Blair announced police had the infamous tape as a
paparazzi-like pack of privacy invaders.

In response to one such reader, the Globe and Mail’s public editor, Sylvia Stead, wrote that photographers “have a right to take news photographs while standing on public property (such as a sidewalk), but if they were asked not to be on Mr. Ford’s private driveway, in my view, they should comply.”

Provided the journalists stay on public property
(as this group did not always do), the pack is not breaking any legal
boundaries in their reporting. But what of the ethical concerns?

Once again, Ford’s unconventional tactics make
the ethics uncertain. Mayor Ford declares himself the people’s mayor, inviting
the whole city to his backyard barbecues and handing out his personal phone number
to anyone who will listen. So how can a reporter draw a line between the mayor
and the man when Ford himself often doesn’t?

As an illustration: When the crack story broke
in May, Goldsbie, in an attempt to get some sort of response, tried the mayor’s
cell phone number. And he wasn’t the only reporter who tried the number.

Weeks later, the mayor returned the call.

“So there was one day in mid-June when he was
returning the calls of the all the different reporters who tried getting a hold
of him … So I spoke to him very briefly. I felt the ethical thing to do was
define myself as media … and he said I called his home and please don't ever
call his home again.”